Ran Liu

This study focuses on the social integration of the pre-1970 first-generation migrants in reformist China, who were born before the year 1970 while getting old in the destination cities. The pre-1970 first-generation migrants are not a homogeneous group but are composed of: (a) those over 45 years old and still working but facing age discrimination; and (b) the elderly granny as nanny assuming the domestic and child-care work for their sons or daughters in the destination cities. We conceptualized and re-defined the aging migrants’ social integration into three dimensions (i.e., participation practices, communication contacts, and subjective perceptions), and used the 2017 Migrant Dynamics Monitoring Survey (MDMS) data from Beijing to measure and explain the varied integration levels among a total of 1267 aging migrant samples in the Beijing metropolis. It is proven that housing tenure matters and housing tenure entitlement would be conductive to beefing up aging migrants’ integration. However, informal housing should not be “stigmatized” as a segregated world, since those dwelling in the informal housing have reported a higher probability of perceiving a fully integrated status (namely subjective well-being, SWB) than those living in the dormitory-like housing. Additionally, an employment-income paradox is found, which shows that higher economic achievement is NOT equivalent to a higher social integration status for the aging migrants.

The urbanization in China is “incomplete” and the migration of non-hukou migrants is circular, wherein rural migrants often keep their rural land in the home village as a social safety net. The informal housing market is one of the main housing providers for migrant workers. Existing studies see informal housing as the migrants’ passive choice under the discriminatory hukou system, while underplaying the migrants’ familial multi-site tenure strategies between village homes and city places. As suggested by New Economics of Labor Migration (NELM), attachment to a place of origin (such as keeping hometown lands), while choosing informal housing at the destination, is a familial utility maximization strategy that can control risks when migrating between locations. Informal housing areas, therefore, become a trans-local rural-urban gradient and semi-urban landscape. We use the 2017 Migrant Dynamics Monitoring Survey data and the binary logistic regression to examine (a) whether hometown landowning is a significant predictor of the migrants’ choosing of a temporary stay in informal settlements in urban destinations, and (b) which kind of hometown land arrangement (farmland or homestead holding or both of them) is the strongest indicator of the higher probability of staying in informal settlements in urban destinations? The data analysis reveals that homestead in hometown is a more prominent pulling factor than farmland to “glue” rural migrants together within an integrated rural land “insurance regime” between the migrant-sending and -receiving places. The land-use and informal housing governance (including urban village demolition) ignore the trans-local nature of the migratory networks and semi-urbanizing dynamics. The traditional analysis of the rural-urban gradient with many landscapes should consider the functional and tenurial linkage between the locations at different points along with the complex migration activities.

Recent policies in China have encouraged rural-urban circular migration and an “amphibious” and flexible status of settlement, reacting against the recent risks of economic fluctuation in cities. Rural land, as a form of insurance and welfare, can handle random hazards, and the new Land Management Law guarantees that rural migrants who settle in the city can maintain their rights to farmland, homesteads, and a collective income distribution. Existing studies have pointed out that homeland tenure can reduce migrants’ urban settlement intentions (which is a self-reported subjective perception of city life). However, little is known about how the rural-urban circularity and rural tenure system (especially for those still holding hometown lands in the countryside) affect rural migrants’ temporary urban settlements (especially for those preferring to stay in informal communities in the host city). The existing studies on the urban villages in China have focused only on the side of the receiving cities, but have rarely mentioned the other side of this process, focusing on migrants’ rural land tenure issues in their hometowns. This study discusses the rationale of informality (the urban village) and attests to whether, and to what extent, rural migrants’ retention of their hometown lands can affect their tenure security choices (urban village or not) in Chinese metropolises such as Beijing. Binary logistic regression was conducted and the data analysis proved that rural migrants who kept their hometown lands, compared to their land-loss counterparts, were more likely to live in a Beijing urban village. This displays the resilience and circularity of rural-urban migration in China, wherein the rural migrant households demonstrate the “micro-family economy”, maintaining tenure security in their hometown and avoiding the dissipation of their family income in their destination. The Discussion and Conclusions sections of this paper refer to some policy implications related to maintaining the rural-urban dual system, protecting rural migrant land rights, and beefing up the “opportunity structure” (including maintaining the low-rent areas in metropolises such as Beijing) in the 14th Five Year Plan period.

The relation between urban land regulation and migrants’ access to decent housing is a fascinating topic in developing countries. Land-use conflicts emerge when entrepreneurial pursuits (for example, the exchange value of land) affect the fortunes of low-wage migrant workers using the destination city to settle down (through the use value of land). Land-use disputes and housing opportunity inequality (between the “land scarcity with migrant explosion” areas and the “land-abundant but migration-inactive” areas) is apparent across different kinds of cities. This article reviews the relationship between China’s urban land supply and regulation system and the migrant housing-condition problem. Our spatial analysis attests to the areal variance of migrant housing conditions (overcrowding and shortages of basic amenities such as toilet and kitchen facilities) across 301 Chinese cities. The analysis results explain the relationship between the inferior housing conditions in the coastal metropolises and the strict management of land uses in China’s first-tier cities. Using micro household data from the national 1% population sampling survey (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2015), this research provides a vivid case study at a large national scale to compare migrant housing amenity across different cities. This empirical study can advance understanding of the land-use disputes (exchange value vs. use value of urban land), which are an important structural root of housing inequality among different kinds of host cities (not merely among migrant workers themselves or across neighborhood scales). This macro-level variance of land demand, supply, and the regulation system proves the key challenge to achieving social harmony. Beyond a top-down land and housing system in China today, some more bottom-up and participatory migrant housing supply means (such as informal housing schemes such as “urban villages”) could be another way to address the above housing challenge. In this sense, we have mapped the migrants’ housing conditions in the Chinese top-down and marketization context, which can be contrasted with the informal and participatory housing supply in some other country contexts.

The relationships between migration and housing congestion have attracted attention in engaging the public against the COVID-19 pandemic and some other public health crises. In recent years in China, promoting the citizenization (“shimin hua”) of migrants and improving the quality of urbanization have become the focus of attention in the new-type urbanization today. The housing space consumption of migrants is one of the important indices to look into regarding their real living status in the receiving cities: how do the housing consumption behavior and residential quality vary between the local, inter- and intra-provincial migratory patterns? This article uses the micro household data of the 1% population sampling survey conducted in 2015 by the National Bureau of Statistics of China to look into the spatial variance of the aggregate housing space consumption behaviors of the local and non-local population at the prefectural level and above in urban China. This study finds that: (a) the longer migratory pattern indicates a thriftier housing space consumption that implies a higher probability of residential overcrowding among the inter-provincial migrants; at the same time, the locals enjoy the greater living comfort than their migrant peers; (b) the spatial variance in terms of housing space consumption can be attributed to a series of destination city contexts, such as the geological background, city administrative rank, areal location, local-nonlocal demography, municipal economic growth, and the local residential development levels. The results show that the more “targeted” housing policies are needed to solve the housing difficulties with migrant workers for a goal of human-centered urbanization development. Although we lack the more detailed data-sets to examine the correlation between public health risks (like the COVID-19 pandemic) and housing congestion problems (especially with the population on the move), this research is still illuminating in terms of how to cut down the public health risk in a highly mobile and rapidly urbanizing context like China.

Rental housing unaffordability has been widely used to assess the housing poverty problem among immigrants in the developed and developing countries. China is experiencing an unprecedented urbanization process, with two-thirds of its 250 million migrants now being sheltered in private rental housing in the host cities. In this paper, we aimed to examine the rental housing unaffordability problems faced by migrant workers in urban China and provide policy recommendations for a more accessible and affordable migrant housing provision system. We used the household data on China’s Migrant Dynamics Monitoring Survey (MDMS), released in 2016, across China’s 329 prefecture-level cities and above to look into the sociality and spatiality of migrant rent expenses and rent-income ratio at the prefecture-level cities and above. The statistical tests were conducted to examine the socio- and spatial-variance of these rent stress indexes, and it was found that educational level is a significant and quite powerful indicator in predicting who will or will not assume the heavier rental housing pressure. We then continued to reveal the different spatiality of high-rent-stress migrants across the high- and low-skilled categories. An agglomeration of the high-skilled high-rent-stress migrants was witnessed in the coastal growth engines of urban clusters, while a more spillover-like pattern among the low-skilled high-rent-stress migrants was reported in our study. An ordinary least square and spatial regression analysis was conducted to explain their respective mechanisms.

We conducted a standardized spatial thinking ability test (STAT) to examine the spatial thinking abilities of a group of Chinese undergraduates with a focus on their spatial reasoning, which is a very important component of critical spatial thinking. The college subject of human geography in China is often geared toward the preparation of students for government consultancy and policy-making tasks, known as the “tasks leading disciplines” (renwu dai xueke), where the pedagogies are problem-solving based and sustainability centered. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has become the universal tool for problem solving in geography and other areas, thus human geography in this situation gives us a context to test and investigate whether and to what extent GIS implementation is able to improve undergraduate spatial thinking levels. Our comparative analysis reported the marginally significant difference of STAT test scores between GIS application (geoinformation group) and its control group (geography group without GIS training). It was also found that the Chinese students performed the spatial reasoning better in this test than American participants as reported in prior study, displaying their higher spatial cognition in terms of problem solving and Boolean logics. Futhermore, a strong negative correlation was reported between STAT test scores and final exam rank. It is possible that the higher geography education in a context of China may not fully embrace the spatial thinking capacity as the strategic goal. The results can help us to better understand the Oriental and Western gaps in higher geography education. Policy suggestions are given in the conclusion.